It’s campaign season, so of course it’s time to accuse former friends and former enemies of accomplishments. It’s the time to renounce personal accomplishments such as health care reform and desire for peace. During campaign season, which is perpetual and perennial, dreams become reality and reality becomes irrelevant.
The latest in campaign antics has just arrived. “Mitt Romney continued his verbal assault on President Obama on Thursday, accusing him of spending too much time at Harvard.” Both president and candidate attended the prestigious institution; “it’s an odd attack coming from a fellow Harvard graduate, especially considering Romney spent more time at the Ivy League institution than Obama did.”
There’s no surprise that Romney pulls randomness such as this out of this air – as a politician, it’s his job – but it exemplifies perfectly both the problem with a perpetual campaign and a human affairs in general. There are, after all, those who really know and those who just feel (video). And they are, each thinks, right. Right, and the other must be wrong. Or at least, not as right, not as correct, and not as reliable or grounded in reality.
Well, until someone says something else, this is the good stuff from the campaign.
Who cares about the American Care Act?
“[If the ACA is struck down,] Republicans will need a Plan B. Unfortunately, they wasted the past three years that might have developed one. If the Supreme Court doesn’t rescue them from themselves, they’ll be heading into this election season arguing, in effect, Our plan is to take away the government-mandated insurance of millions of people under age 65, and replace it with nothing. And we’re doing this so as to better protect the government-mandated insurance of people over 65—until we begin to phase out that insurance, too, for everybody now under 55,” – David Frum.
As George Zornick reported last week, House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s budget for the coming fiscal year would have a devastating impact on the poor, elderly and disabled. By turning Medicare into a private voucher system and Medicaid into a block grant program, along with cuts to food stamps, it paints a frightening picture of what would happen if Republicans sweep the next election. Ryan’s plan enjoys enough support to pass in the House. In the Senate, which Republicans are likely to take over because Democrats have so many more seats up for re-election, it would only need a simple majority since budget bills can avoid being filibustered.
And that is why Ryan’s budget helps President Obama. If Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, replaced Obama in the White House, along with a Republican Congress, the Ryan plan would become law. Romney has been a supporter of Ryan’s…
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We have found the enemy, and they are … us? They are white, black, brown, yellow, and every other shade of people, and they are as Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and atheist as the rest of us. They are as quiet and generally peaceful as the rest of us. They are workers and unemployed, side by side. They are rich and poor, old and young, as childless or having as many mouths to feed as the rest of us.
They have taken to the streets. We have taken to the streets, even those of us who have not. Being indoors is nice, but the ind00r sign-a-petition, gather-and-talk-about-how-bad-things-are method is not solving our problems. Will the streets?
Those who are in the streets have not been entirely clear with their demands. They view the street as theirs, as a result of taxes, and claim the First Amendment as their permit, much to the chagrin of those who go through the permitting process. It is clear to anyone not stuck on a mobius strip, though, what some of the demands are. Among other things, 49.1 million Americans live below the poverty level. Student loan debt is higher than credit card debt.
It must tiresome for the hundreds of cities where people have decided to Occupy public space. They could do like New York and arrest hundreds, or like Santa Barbara and enforce ordinances against camping and being in a park past 10pm, or like Atlanta and arrest hundreds, or like Oakland and cause serious injuries, or like Portland and threaten to use chemical agents and non-lethal weapons.
If it comes down to a simple matter of right and wrong, it is wrong – disastrously, stupidly, wrong; just as we would say about foreign countries – for police to use chemical agents or non-lethal weapons against Americans engaging in a peaceful, in prolonged, protest. Portland Police, do not make an enemy of yourself, for we are you and you are us.
In 2007, then-candidate John McCain blew any chance of serious foreign-policy discussion when he reverted to singing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” Bombing a country is generally considered serious. We’re long past this faux-pas of McCain’s in the middle of another round of Republican primary season, in which foreign policy is completely ignored. That’s not the point though. Bombing Iran is a frequent theme, and if candidates for office aren’t discussing it, policy-makers and observers of international affairs are talking about it.
In July of this year, MJ Rosenberg wrote a fascinating article about the near future. My experience is that he’s not given to hyperbole of scaremongering, and wasn’t writing to get people excited or vitriolic. He may have been writing to put the world on guard; or even, to write what would happen in order to prevent it from happening. Rosenberg was writing, or course, about bombing Iran – not advocating it, merely discussing the future. Happily for us, this was supposed to happen in September, about two months ago. September has come and gone, and with it Israel’s only chance to bomb Iran that month.
His informant was “a longtime CIA officer” who more than twenty years in the Middle East, and “is predicting that Israel will bomb Iran this fall, dragging the United States into another major war and endangering U.S. military and civilian personnel (and other interests) throughout the Middle East and beyond.” The CIA informant, “[Robert] Baer has had a storied career, including a stint in Iraq in the 1990s where he organized opposition to Saddam Hussein. (He was recalled after being accused of trying to organize Saddam’s assassination). Upon his retirement, he received a top decoration for meritorious service.” Where does Baer get his information? “Baer didn’t name sources for his prediction of an Israeli attack, but the few he did cite are all Israeli security figures who have publicly warned that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are hell-bent on war.”
The named sources include “former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, who “left the Israeli intelligence agency in September 2010 and [in May] predicted that Israel would attack and that doing so would be ‘the stupidest thing’ he could imagine.” Besides the abject stupidity of war, what would happen? Dagan said “the Iranians have the capability to fire rockets at Israel for a period of months, and Hizbollah could fire tens of thousands of grad rockets and hundreds of long-range missiles.” Unlike debate over nuclear capability, that’s not speculation. Chiefs and formers heads of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, usually don’t comment on public policy, much less much derisive remarks about the coalition government. And “Dagan is very conservative on security matters….one of the most rightwing militant people ever born here. … When this man says that the leadership has no vision and is irresponsible, we should stop sleeping soundly at night,” according to Ben Caspit, of MaAriv. Also, Dagan isn’t the only one commenting. “According to Think Progress, citing the Forward newspaper, 12 of the 18 living ex-chiefs of Israel’s two security agencies (Mossad and Shin Bet), are ‘either actively opposing Netanyahu’s stances or have spoken out against them.’ Of the remaining six, two are current ministers in Netanyahu government, leaving a grand total of four out of 18 who independently support the prime minister.”
Some statements are wrong. Other statements are written so that predicted things shall not come to pass. Whichever was intended when MJ Rosenberg wrote about information that Baer, a former member of the CIA, predicted to international media, the bombing of Iran did not happen. According to Baer’s prediction, there was a “‘near certainty’ that Netanyahu is ‘planning an attack [on Iran] … and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he’s also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict.'” With at least six weeks warning in the international media, was Israel, and/or the US, wise enough to stop the planned attack, or use diplomatic leverage to stop the attack? Or was there never any thought of bombing Iran?
This latter thought is unlikely. The discussion of bombing Iran didn’t end with McCain in 2007, or with Rosenberg and Baer in the summer of 2011. A few days ago, at the beginning of November, Israel’s ynetnews ran an article titled “IDF [Israeli Defense Force] Ready to Strike Iran.” “Anyone following the intensive drills held by the Air Force in the Mediterranean and in distant regions realizes that Netanyahu’s and Barak’s declarations that Israel will not tolerate nuclear arms in Iranian hands is backed up by practical capabilities developed by the Air Force and by our military industries. No less importantly, the international community and the Iranians fully realize that Israel’s top politicians are seriously considering such strike in order to curb or at least delay the Iranian race to the bomb. This is assuming there is no non-military, efficient option to secure this aim.” The problem is recognized, nicely, that “the above is contingent upon absolute certainty that Iran has already started to produce the bomb and that all other ways to prevent Tehran from doing so have been exhausted.”
If the goal of writing is to prevent the future from happening, that is also the goal of war. The author of the ynetnews article recognizes, though, that “the above scenario is still relatively far off, as according to all estimates the Iranians are not expected to complete their preparations to produce nuclear weapons before 2015.” Given the argument that Israel will only bomb Iran to “curb or at least delay” Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, and even Israel says that won’t be before 2015, perhaps nuclear weapons are just a red herring?
Scott Olson became famous quickly, but probably not how he wanted to. A former marine acting bravely shouldn’t come as any surprise. A former marine being hit in the head by a projectile thrown by police, however, should come as a surprise. “His injury” – a nice phrase for being hit hard in the head – “is believed to have damaged the speech centre of his brain.”
The Oakland Police appear to have raised the stakes against their own interests:
Smart crowd control requires letting protesters protest – giving them an outlet. In Oakland on Tuesday evening, long before anything bad happened, police decided to deny Occupy Oakland that outlet. A peaceful, if rowdy march was headed from the main library toward Frank Ogawa Plaza – the location from which they’d been forcefully evicted the night before. They were headed off by a hastily assembled line of police clad in riot gear. The protesters decided to change course and head toward the jail where, according to a National Lawyers’ Guild observer on the scene, 105 protesters were being detained.
Again, the police blocked their route. They made another turn (I don’t know what the objective was at that point) and were again blocked. The police did not have the manpower to actually block the many cross-streets we crossed, but somewhere a commander decided to put five or six cops on every side street. This was a stupid move, as five officers cannot keep 500 protesters, now angrier than they had been at the onset, at bay….
There were injuries and arrests. I think none of it would have happened had they decided to let the protesters chant, “let them go!” for a while in front of the jail instead of forcing them – seemingly arbitrarily– to walk around in circles facing off against line after line of police blocking their way….
The police response last night wasn’t the most brutal I’ve seen (that honor goes to the dozen Florida police agencies that descended on Miami to crush protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in 2002), but it was the most inept. By aggressively boxing in protesters again and again, law enforcement simply ratcheted up the pressure for no apparent purpose.
Writing about Trust in Government, I wrote that I am one of those “dangerous and endangered class of people that says what I think about government when I disagree and do so in a public place.” I closed out that article by quoting Glenn Greenwald, of Salon magazine, saying “‘political liberties are meaningless if they’re conditioned on obeisance to political power or if citizens are frightened out of exercising them in any way that matters.'” At that time – oh, far off land of eight months prior! – I was writing about Wikileaks, with an aside mention of the protests in Wisconsin.
We have long since transitioned from Wisconsin to Occupy Wall Street. We’re in a similar state of affairs, in which there is widespread, international, support for the protesters but hesitancy and reticence by local government, and thus by police, whom the protesters claim to represent, to support Occupiers. By October 4th it was already clear that the NYPD and FBI were acting covertly to discredit the protesters. The “NYPD, Mayor Bloomberg (who made his fortune on Wall Street), the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House are doing everything possible to keep the occupation of Wall Street from reaching an ‘Arab Spring’ tipping point. Populist uprisings are lauded overseas, but they are perceived as a threat to elite corporate governance in the US.” On October 15th, in New York “what was unknown to a lot of people that day, including those in Times Square, was that there were undercover cops already there, paid to be disruptive and to be loud.” A protester who was arrested for joining a demonstration against the banks before closing his account said that “there are a ridiculous amount of undercover cops within the Occupy Wall Street movement that are making things less safe. There will be a mic check about how to stay safe, stay out of traffic, and the undercover cops interfere, lead people in the wrong way, in ways that are illegal, and get them sent to prison. You saw this in Times Square.”
What do the protesters want? “It takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling.” Meanwhile, the young, who do not start out rich, are getting poorer. “An entire generation of young people around the world has come of age only to find that the self-help-y mantras served up during their adolescence as a sort of substitute for economic policy no longer apply post-2007. Unemployment among 16 to 29-year-olds is at its highest rate since WWII.” It’s stands to reason that “a combination of inflated tuition costs and the proliferation of low-wage jobs is making the promise of financial security — and the dream of prosperity — increasingly elusive for many.” One of the issues – a sort of list of grievances – frequently brought up by the Occupiers at Wall Street and around the country is student debt. “In the U.S. alone, the total amount students owe will soon reach a trillion dollars, surpassing the amount owed on credit cards.”
A more recent Glenn Greenwald, from October 27th, elucidates our two-tiered society. “The powerful are treated with far more deference by judges than the powerless. The same cultural, socioeconomic, and demographic biases that plague society generally also infect the legal process. Few people who have had any interaction with the justice system would dispute this….Those” – notice the word those, which implies corporation-people as well as people-people – “with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever. The criminal justice system is now almost exclusively reserved for ordinary Americans, who are routinely subjected to harsh punishments even for the pettiest of offenses.” I intended to go into some depth about the similarities and differences between ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the ‘Tea Party.’ I’ll save much of that for a different topic, but both groups fawn over the constitution. The difference is in how each side perceives the limits of government. To one, government is a force to limit corruption. To the other, government is a corruption to limited. For Greenwald, and for people who do not desire our disparate society, “the supremacy of law is not just one among many instruments of good government; it is good government itself. The converse is equally true: in the absence of the rule of law, good government cannot be said to exist….The central principle of America’s founding was that the rule of law would be the prime equalizing force, the ultimate guardian of justice.” It is clear, historically and rationally, that we need to turn to “the uniform application of a set of preexisting rules to everyone, including the rulers,” a system in which “the powerful [are] subjected to its dictates on equal terms with the powerless.”
Also, Occupy Wall Street is “against the corporations that corrupt the system, deplete the Treasury and ultimately aren’t held accountable for their crimes. The protesters are demanding that the corporate criminals who engaged in the shoddy, Machiavellian investment scams that plunged us into the deepest recession since the Great Depression be held accountable for their actions. To date, not a single instigator of the economic collapse has been prosecuted.” The list of grievances discussed by Occupy Wall Street is lengthy.
The subheader of an article titled “Occupy the No-Spin Zone” reads ‘one of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is the way it confuses and ignores the shrill pundit class.’ It is, therefore, hard to use media – particularly mainstream media such as television and syndicated articles, to enumerate the demands of a protest that does not make publish a list of demands. “What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television.” It’s hard not to agree that “it takes a walloping amount of willful cluelessness to look at a mass of people holding up signs and claim that they have no message.” Indeed, “Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.”
Returning to the issue of trust, “the only people who are scared of the ‘violent mobs’ at Occupy Wall Street are the people being paid to call them violent mobs.” We started with Greenwald’s well-posited notion that “political liberties are meaningless if they’re conditioned on obeisance to political power or if citizens are frightened out of exercising them in any way that matters;” local governments have been attempting to frighten people of out exercising rights in any ways that matter. Overnight, on October 25th, “the police in both Oakland and Atlanta forcibly tried to shut down the Occupy movements in those cities.” “The reaction of Oakland police was extreme, firing beanbag rounds and flash canisters into the crowd and launching tear gas at them and driving them from a park they had occupied for two weeks.” Famously – and to say ‘stupidly’ or ‘unfortunately’ would be an understatement – a 24-year-old former Marine was hit in the head by a tear gas canister thrown by riot police. At the hospital – which protesters, not police, transported him to, he has gone from ‘critical’ to ‘fair’ condition. That may make little difference, as the often-beleaguered Oakland Police Department finds that this will lead to a general strike.
While it is clear that Scott Olson was hit by police wearing uniforms it is not unlikely that “right now” (says an article more than three weeks old), “the NYPD – and the FBI – are engaged in low intensity corralling of the protesters. They are playing a waiting game, hoping that the protest will exhaust itself. But if the participants grow – as appears to be the case with the increasing support of unions and the enhanced credibility of the movement – watch for a law enforcement “false flag” operation. You’ll know about it instantly, because it will probably be the first time you’ll see any serious interest in the Wall Street protests on TV. The revolution won’t be televised; but the government takedown of democracy and peaceful assembly will be.” The “revolution” was not the topic of television before Scott Olson (except for the occasional “what can it all mean”), but now television has an intriguing story.
And “Atlanta’s finest were more peaceful as they just arrested all fifty people occupying a park in downtown Atlanta and handcuffed them and carried them off to jail, but the result was the same, a metropolitan police force at the direction of its mayor attacked its own citizens for peacefully assembling and protesting its government.” I’m sure that John Talbott is correct that “if this had happened in China or Syria, our state department would be filing letters of protest as we speak.” In the first month of the Occupy Wall Street movement – on October 18th – 1,500 American citizens had been arrested in cities and towns across the country. While a small handful of them have been charged with various acts of mayhem, the vast majority were peacefully demonstrating. Most of the arrested won’t be charged, but it will “keep them off the streets” for a little while.
On its face, ‘occupying’ public space should be guaranteed under the First Amendment. The courts have long held that ‘expressive activities’ are accorded the same protections as the right to speak or freedom of the press….The First Amendment’s guarantees are not, however, absolute. The government is able to determine the appropriate time, place and manner for citizens to speak their mind, as long as those restrictions are based on maintaining public order and aren’t designed to prevent a particular message from getting out….The state can’t place limits that effectively leave no outlet for citizens’ expression.
It didn’t take long – less than twenty-four hours, if you look at things from a certain angle – for the Occupy movement to become an international movement. One of the original members, who arrived on September 18th, the second day, is Kobi Skolnick, an ex-settler and Chabadnik turned non-Observant Israeli. This is not the only protest Skolnick ever participated in. “‘I participated in protests against the Oslo Accords. I was an activist for Zo Artzenu. I was also arrested during the protests. But I have undergone a change and today I do not agree with their opinions and with their extreme ideologies. It’s not as though I accept the murderous acts of terrorists, but you can’t ignore the fact that the Palestinians suffered,’ he said. ‘Today I’m a man of peace, [looking] to bring about world change.'”
In London, people are occupying the plaza of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Football (what we call soccer) was noticeable in mid-October, not long after the camp begin. “it’s starting a conversation;” not all the players are campers, some are bankers passing by. It’s “what the camp stands for: dialogue.” People always impatiently ask what the occupiers’ ‘demands’ are, and why collectively they seem unwilling, or unable to provide quick-fix solutions. These questions miss the point….If anything, the camp itself is their demand, and their solution: the stab at an alternative society that at least aims to operate without hierarchy, and with full, participatory democracy.”
The Occupy camp in New York, meanwhile, is using an economic system that seems to work: Larry, a 47-year-old licensed barber from Staten Island, gives free haircuts and shaves at his makeshift barbershop complete with clippers, scissors and one of those cloaks that keep hair off the customers’ clothes. “Well, I’ve been here, protesting and supporting, and I figured today was going to be a nice day, no rain. Why not, you know? Let me do what I can to help people.” One of the most striking things about volunteer labor is the duration of workers’ stamina – workers who, at a wage-paying job, might well be checking the clock every few minutes. Nick the tobacconist has no plans to stop rolling cigarettes as long as the occupation of Wall Street rolls on. Says Larry the barber, “I’m going to be here until I need a break; I got a big line coming later on today.”
Yesterday I had the lack of pleasure of engaging in a one-sided conversation in which I did not do the speaking. She who was speaking at me was talking about how peace will not come to the world until the uninformed are informed, and that the whole problem with society is misinformation. You may well imagine the staccato in which this was said – you’ve heard these people before. Iran entered the conversation. Does Iran have nuclear weapons? Clearly, yes, because Iran is said to have nuclear weapons.
Now, I can only go on information here, but the International Atomic Energy Agency, the international regulatory agency in charge of nuclear power, says that Iran is nowhere close to nuclear capability. Additionally, in speaking about the horrors Iran has in store for America, and misinformation in the information age, Mississippi asked Iran to send doctors to teach an American state about how to run healthcare. This is an AP article; it’s hardly fair to blame the media alone for keeping us misinformed.
An NYPD policy:
An undercover man ran up from behind and tackled me. Next, he decked me. He said someone had been robbed and I “fit the description.” It soon became clear what “description” he was talking about. He and other cops had also stopped a 40-something year old who was 5’6″ with a full beard. I was only 13 years old, no facial hair yet, and six feet tall. The only thing we had in common was our Black skin and our stylish trench coats (which, again, everybody was wearing).
That was 1961. Things haven’t changed. “This is the reality of what goes on in New York City alone with the New York Police Department’s policy of ‘Stop & Frisk.’ More than 83 percent of those stopped are Black or Latino, many are as young as 11 or 12, and more than 90 percent of them were doing nothing wrong when the police stopped, humiliated, brutalized them or worse.”
Today Carl Dix is “joining arms with Cornel West and others to voluntarily land myself in the custody of the police. We are conducting non-violent civil disobedience at the 28th Police Precinct in Harlem, New York to put a stop to the NYPD policy of ‘Stop & Frisk.'”
End the policy.
The Dole Blog 